July 10, 2017: Marketing Watson & office dogs

Hi everyone! We hope your Monday wasn’t too rough. 🙂 Karen, Michelle, and I had a wonderful day back at work with a round-table discussion with Rashmy Chatterjee, IBM North America’s Chief Marketing Officer. The three of us and the other DBG interns had a fascinating conversation with her about the history of IBM and how it has the very unique ability to “transform” itself. I thought that it was so interesting how IBM has distinguished itself from many other companies by not only being able to reinvent itself and its beliefs, but being able to do it multiple times!

We also talked about the difficulties of marketing Watson and the many challenges of reinventing the public’s perception of Watson and its capabilities. I actually found this to be extremely though-provoking because while it may at first seem fairly simple to market Watson and all of its amazing capabilities, the many potential difficulties are revealed the more you think about it. How do you get across to an audience of various ages, professions, and knowledge of tech that Watson is way more complex than Siri? How do you get them to see that Watson can do so much more for businesses and people than just tell them what the weather is like? Not as easy, huh? Another reason why Michelle, Karen, and I really enjoyed this discussion was because we got an inside look at marketing and the multiple perspectives needed to be considered, so that was super cool.

Touring the Galvanize building in SF

COOL THING WE DID TODAY: We spent the afternoon working at Galvanize with the other interns, which is a building that multiple companies rent out for their employees to work at. It had a full-stocked cafe, super comfy chairs, an indoor “garden” sponsored by Google, and office dogs. Yes, that’s right. Office dogs. It was a really great experience!